Juliet, Naked

two

Annie scrolled back through the photo library on her computer and started to wonder whether her whole life had been a waste of time. She wasn’t, she liked to think, a nostalgic, or a Luddite. She preferred her iPod to Duncan’s old vinyl, she enjoyed having hundreds of TV channels to choose from, and she loved her digital camera. It’s just that in the old days, when you eventually got your pictures back from the drugstore, you never went backward through time. You shuffled through the twenty-four holiday snapshots, only seven of which were any good, put them in a drawer and forgot about them. You didn’t have to compare them to every other holiday you’d had in the last seven or eight years. But now she couldn’t resist it. When she uploaded or downloaded or whatever it was you did, the new photos took their place alongside all the others, and the seamlessness was beginning to depress her.

Look at them. There’s Duncan. There’s Annie. There’s Duncan and Annie. There’s Annie, Duncan, Duncan, Annie, Duncan standing at a urinal, pretending to have a pee… Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting. On the other hand, being childless meant that you could, if you were in a negative frame of mind, come to the conclusion that your snapshots were a little on the dull side. Nobody grew up or got bigger; no landmark occasions were commemorated, because there were none. Duncan and Annie just got slowly older, and a little fatter. (She was being loyal here. She hadn’t got much fatter at all, she noticed.) Annie had single friends who’d never had kids, but their holiday photos, usually taken in exotic locations, were never boring—or rather, they didn’t feature the same two people over and over again, quite often wearing the same T-shirts and sunglasses, quite often sitting by the same swimming pool in the same hotel on the Amalfi coast.

Her single childless friends seemed to meet new people on their travels, people who then became friends. Duncan and Annie had never made friends on holiday: Duncan was always terrified of speaking to anybody, in case they should “get stuck.” Once, sitting by the pool at the hotel on the Amalfi coast, Duncan had spotted someone reading the same book as him, a relatively obscure biography of some soul or blues musician. Some people—most people, maybe—would have regarded this as a happy and unlikely coincidence worth a smile or a hello, maybe even a drink and an eventual exchange of e-mail addresses; Duncan marched straight to their bedroom, put the book away and got out another one, just in case the other reader wanted to talk to him. Maybe it wasn’t her whole life that had been a waste of time—maybe it was just the fifteen years that she’d spent with Duncan. A chunk of her life, rescued! The chunk that finished in 1993! The photos from the American holiday didn’t do much to lift her gloom. Why had she allowed herself to be snapped outside an old-fashioned ladies’ underwear shop in Queens, New York, adopting exactly the same pose that Tucker had struck for the album cover of You and Me Both?

Duncan’s sudden rejection of all things Tucker made it all even more pointless. She kept asking him what had happened at Juliet’s house, but he simply claimed that he’d been losing interest for a while, and the morning in Berkeley had underlined the ridiculousness of it all. Annie didn’t buy it. He’d been blabbing on about Juliet all through breakfast that morning and he was clearly upset about something that afternoon when she saw him back at the hotel; the evidence suggested a Minneapolis toilet-style incident, destined to provoke wild Internet speculation among Crowologists forever.

She closed her photo library and went down to the hall to pick up all the mail that had been lying on the floor since they got home that morning. Duncan had already picked out all his Amazon parcels, and he wasn’t interested in anything else he got, so once she’d finished opening her mail, she started to tear open his, just in case there was anything that shouldn’t go straight into the recycling bin. There was an invitation to a symposium for English teachers, two invitations to apply for a credit card and a brown envelope containing a letter and a CD in one of those see-through plastic sleeves.

Annie had in her hands a new Tucker Crowe release, and her excitement wasn’t even vicarious, just as it wouldn’t be vicarious if Duncan were elected prime minister. In the entire fifteen years of their relationship, this had never happened before, and as a consequence she didn’t know how to react. She would have called Duncan on his cell, but his cell was right in front of her, plugged into the spare socket by the kettle to recharge; she would have loaded it straight onto his iPod, but he’d taken that with him to work. (Both gadgets had come back from their holiday with drained batteries. One had been taken care of straightaway, the other forgotten about until just before Duncan left the house.) So how was she supposed to mark the occasion?

She took the CD out of its plastic sleeve and put it into the portable player they kept in the kitchen. But instead of pressing the “play” button, her finger hovered above it for a second. Could she really listen to it before he did? It felt like one of those moments in a relationship—and there were enough of them in theirs, God knows—that would look completely innocuous to an outsider, but which were packed with meaning and aggression. Annie could imagine telling Ros at work that Duncan had gone absolutely nuts because she played a new CD when he wasn’t at home, and Ros would be suitably appalled and disgusted. But she wouldn’t be telling the whole story. She’d be telling a self-serving version, omitting the context. And, of course, it would be legitimate to feel bafflement and outrage if Ros didn’t understand, but Annie knew Duncan too well. She understood. She knew that playing the CD was an act of naked hostility, even if anyone peering through the windows wouldn’t be able to see the nakedness.

She put the CD back in its sleeve and made herself a cup of coffee. Duncan had only gone to pick up a timetable for the new semester, so he’d be back in less than an hour. Oh, this is ridiculous, she thought. Told herself, anyway, telling oneself being a more self-conscious mode of self-communication, and thus a more efficient way of lying, than thinking. Why couldn’t she put on some music she’d almost certainly like while she was pottering around in the kitchen? Why not pretend that Duncan was a normal person, with a healthy relationship to the things that pleased him? She put the disk back in the machine, and this time she pressed “play.” And already she was preparing the opening lines of the skirmish to come.

To begin with, she was so stirred up by the act of playing the CD, the drama and the treachery of it, that she forgot to listen to the music—she was too busy composing her retorts. “It’s just a CD, Duncan!” “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but I quite like Juliet too.” (That “quite”—so innocent and casual, and yet so wounding. She hoped.) “It never occurred to me for a moment that I wasn’t allowed to listen!” “Oh, don’t be such a baby!” Where had this ill feeling sprung from? It wasn’t as if their relationship was any more precarious than it ever had been. But she could see now that a lot of resentment had been locked into her somewhere, and it was busy, restless stuff, roaming around looking for the tiniest open window. The last time she’d felt like this was during a house-share at university, when she’d found herself setting ridiculously complicated and time-consuming traps to catch a housemate whom she suspected of stealing her cookies. It took her a while to understand that the cookies weren’t really the point, and that somehow, without her noticing, she’d come to loathe this other girl—her greed, her smugness, her face and voice and bathrobe. Was that happening here? Juliet, Naked was both as blameless and as incendiary as a chocolate chip cookie.

Eventually she managed to stop wondering whether she hated her life partner and to start listening. And what she heard was exactly what she might have guessed she’d hear if she’d read about Juliet, Naked in a newspaper: it was Juliet, but without all the good bits. That probably wasn’t fair. Those lovely melodies were all there, intact, and Crowe had clearly written most of the lyrics, although a couple of the songs were missing choruses. But it was so tentative, so unadorned—it was like listening to one of those people you’ve never heard of who comes onstage at lunchtime in a folk festival. There wasn’t really any music to it yet, no violins, no electric guitars, no rhythm, none of the texture or the detail that still contained surprises, even after all this time. And there was no anger that she could hear, either, no pain. If she were still a teacher, she’d have played the two albums back-to-back to her sixth-formers, so that they could understand that art was pretending. Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made Juliet, but he couldn’t just march into a recording studio and start howling. He’d have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself. Juliet, Naked proved how clever Tucker Crowe was, Annie thought, how artful; but only because of all the things that were missing, not because of anything that you could actually hear.

Annie heard the front door open during “Blood Ties,” the second-from-last song. She hadn’t really been tidying up the kitchen while she’d been listening, but now she busied herself, and the stab at multitasking was in itself a form of betrayal: It’s just an album I put on! No big deal!

“How was college?” she asked him when he walked in. “Anything happen while you were away?”

But already he wasn’t listening to her. He was standing still, his head pointed toward the speakers like some kind of hunting dog.

“What’s… Hold on. Don’t tell me. That Tokyo radio-show bootleg? The solo acoustic one?” And then, with rising panic, “He didn’t play ‘Blood Ties’ then.”

“No, it’s…”

“Sssshh.”

They both listened for a few bars. Annie watched his confusion and began to enjoy it.

“But this…” He stopped again. “This is… It’s nothing.”

She burst out laughing. But of course! If Duncan had never heard it before, then all he could do was deny its existence.

“I mean, it’s something, but… I give up.”

“Juliet, Naked, it’s called.”

“What’s called?” More panic. His world was tilting on its axis, and he was sliding right off.

“This album.”

“What album?”

“The one we’re listening to.”

“This album is called Juliet, Naked.”

“Yes.”

“There is no album called Juliet, Naked.”

“There is now.”

She picked up the note from Paul Hill and handed it to him. He read it, read it again, read it for a third time.

“But this is addressed to me. You opened my post.”

“I always open your post,” she said. “If I don’t open your post, it stays unopened.”

“I open the interesting letters.”

“You left this one because it looked boring.”

“But it isn’t boring.”

“No. But I had to open it to find that out.”

“You had no right,” he said. “And then… To actually play it… I don’t believe this.”

Annie never got a chance to chuck any of her scripted darts at him. He marched over to the CD player, pulled the disk out of the player and marched off.

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all—a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.

Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever it was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first-century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder. Give me something that stumps me for a moment, something that sends me scurrying off to the cyber reference library. Sometimes, when the computer seemed to whir for longer than usual, Duncan got the feeling that he’d set some kind of a challenge; but then one day, when he was stocking up his iPod with back catalog, it had taken nearly three minutes to obtain the track names for Abbey Road, and it was clear that any delay was due to a bad connection or something, and not because Neil Headphones was stumped. So recently Duncan had been taking pleasure in those rare occasions when Neil couldn’t help him, and he’d had to fill out the titles himself, even though it was boring. It meant that he was off the well-trodden paths and into the musical jungle. Neil Headphones had never heard of Juliet, Naked, which was something of a consolation. Duncan couldn’t have borne it if the information had popped up without any effort on anyone’s part, as if he were the seven-hundredth person to have requested it that day.

He didn’t want to listen to Juliet, Naked straightaway. He was still too angry, both with Annie and, more obscurely, with the album itself, which seemed to belong to her more than him. So he was grateful for the time it took to name the tracks (he took a gamble on the track listing being the same on Naked, as he was already learning to call it, as it was on the original album—the long last song, six minutes even in its demo form, suggested that it would be), and then for his machine to inhale the music into itself. What had she been thinking of? He wanted to find a benign interpretation for her behavior, but there just wasn’t one. It was malevolence, pure and simple. Why did she hate him so much, all of a sudden? What had he done?

He plugged his iPod in, transferred the album with a still-miraculous click of the finger and flick of the wrist, picked his jacket up from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and went out.

He went down to the seashore. He’d grown up in the London suburbs, and still couldn’t get used to the idea that the sea was five minutes’ walk away. It wasn’t much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown. The weather conditions were perfect for his needs, though. The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they’d been bereaved that morning. Fallacies really never got more pathetic than this. He got himself a cup of takeout instant coffee from the kebab stand by the pier and sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean. He was ready.

Forty-one minutes later, he was scrabbling around in his pockets for something he could use as a handkerchief when a middle-aged woman came over and touched him on the arm.

“Do you need someone to talk to?” she said gently.

“Oh. Thank you. No, no, I’m fine.”

He touched his face—he’d been crying harder than he’d realized.

“You sure? You don’t look fine.”

“No, really. I’ve just… I’ve just had a very intense emotional experience.” He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. “On here.”

“You’re crying about music?”

The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.

“Well,” said Duncan, “I’m not crying about it. I’m not sure that’s the right preposition.”

She shook her head and walked off.

He listened from beginning to end twice more while sitting on the bench, and then started to walk home during the third play. One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. What did it matter that Annie had heard the album before he’d had his chance? Imagine all the people who’d heard the original album before he’d discovered it! Imagine all the people who’d seen Taxi Driver before him, come to that! Did that deaden its impact? Did it make it less his? He wanted to go home, hug her and talk about a morning that he would never forget. He wanted to hear what she had to say, too. He valued her insights into Crowe’s work—she could be surprisingly shrewd, sometimes, given her unwillingness to immerse herself in the subject, and he wanted to hear whether she’d noticed the same things that he’d picked up: the lack of chorus in “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” for example, which gave the song a relentlessness and a self-loathing that you couldn’t really detect in its “finished” form. (He’d play this version to anyone who dared to trot out that tired old line about Crowe being the poor man’s Dylan. “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” in Duncan’s opinion, was “Positively Fourth Street,” but it had more texture and heft. And Tucker could sing.) And who’d have thought that “And You Are?” could sound so ominous? On Juliet, it was a song about two people making a connection straightaway—in other words, it was a simple (but very pretty) love song, a sunny day before the psychic storms started rolling in from the sea. But on Juliet, Naked, it was as if the lovers were standing in a little pool of sunlight that was becoming smaller even while they were talking for the first time. They could see the thunder and the rain already, and it made the album more complete, somehow, more coherent. It was a proper tragedy, with the doom about to befall them implied from the very beginning. The flat restraint of “You and Your Perfect Life,” meanwhile, gave the song a staggering power that was muffled by the histrionics of the rock ’n’ roll version.

Annie was still in the kitchen when he got home, reading the Guardian at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He went up behind her and hugged her, probably for longer than she was comfortable being hugged.

“What’s that for?” she said, with moderate but determined affection. “I thought you were annoyed with me.”

“I’m sorry. Stupid. Petty. What does it matter who hears it first?”

“I know. I should have warned you it was a bit on the dreary side. But I thought that would make you even crosser.”

He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He let go of her, took a breath, waited for the impact to fade a little before he spoke again.

“You didn’t like it?”

“Well, it was all right. Mildly interesting, if you’ve heard the other one. I don’t suppose I’ll play it again. What did you think?”

“I think it’s a masterpiece. I think it blows the other one out of the water. And as the other one is my favorite album of all time…”

“You’re not serious?”

“ ‘Dreary’! My God! What else is dreary, according to you? King Lear? The Waste Land?”

“Don’t do that, Duncan. You always lose your powers of reason when you get angry.”

“That’s anger for you.”

“No, but… We’re not having an argument. We’re trying to discuss, you know, a work of art.”

“Not according to you. According to you we’re trying to discuss a piece of shit.”

“There you go. You think it’s King Lear, I think it’s a piece of shit… Get a grip, Duncan. I love the other one. I suspect most people will feel the same way.”

“Oh, most people. We all know what most people think about everything. The wisdom of fucking crowds. Jesus. Most people would rather buy an album made by a dancing midget from a reality TV show.”

“Duncan Thomson, the great populist.”

“I’m just… I’m so disappointed in you, Annie. I thought you were better than that.”

“Ah, yes. That’s the next step. It becomes a moral failing on my part. A character weakness.”

“But I’m sorry to say that’s how it is. If you can’t hear anything in this…”

“What? Please. Tell me. I’d love to know what that would say about me.”

“The usual stuff.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is, I don’t know. You’re a moron.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t say you were a moron. I said you were a moron if you can’t hear anything in this.”

“I can’t.”

He left the house again, then, and went back to the bench overlooking the sea with his iPod.

Another hour or so went by before he even thought about the website. He’d be the first to write about the album, if he were quick. Better than that: he’d be the first to alert the Crowe community to its existence, even! He’d listened to Juliet, Naked four times, and he had already thought of a great deal he wanted to say about it; in any case, to wait any longer would be to risk his advantage. He didn’t think Paul Hill would have contacted anyone else from the message boards yet, but copies would have been pushed through all sorts of mailboxes this morning. He had to go home, however much hostility he felt toward Annie.

He managed to avoid her anyway. She was on the phone in the kitchen, probably to her mother. (And who wanted to speak to a member of the family, immediately on return from holiday? Didn’t that prove something? What, he wasn’t precisely sure. But it seemed to him that anyone still so connected to family—to childhood, essentially—was hardly going to be able to respond to the kind of stark adult truths spread generously through the ten songs on Juliet, Naked. She’d get it one day, maybe, but clearly not for a few years yet.)

Their shared office was on the half landing. The real estate agent who sold them the house was inexplicably convinced that they would one day use the tiny room as a nursery, before deciding to move out of town and buy a house with a garden. They would then sell this house to another couple who would, in time, do the same thing. Duncan had wondered whether their childlessness was a direct response to the depressing predictability of it all— whether the real estate agent had, inadvertently but effectively, made their minds up for them.

It was the opposite of a nursery now. It contained two laptops, placed side by side on a workbench, two chairs, a machine that converted vinyl into MP3s and about two thousand CDs, including bootlegs of every single concert Tucker Crowe had performed between 1982 and 1986, with the exception of the September 1984 show at KB in Malmö, Sweden, which, bizarrely, nobody seems to have taped—a constant thorn in the side of all serious students, given that this, according to a normally reliable Swedish source, was the night Crowe chose to do a never-to-be-repeated cover version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” He cleared away the bank statements and letters that Annie had opened and placed by his computer for his attention, opened a document and began to type. He produced three thousand words in just under two hours and posted it on the website shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. By ten o’clock that night, there were 163 comments, from fans in eleven different countries.

The next day, he would see that he’d overcooked it a little. “Juliet, Naked means that everything else Tucker Crowe recorded is suddenly a little paler, a little too slick, a little too digested… And if it does that to Crowe’s work, imagine what it does to everyone else’s.” He hadn’t wanted to get into arguments about the relative merits of James Brown, or the Stones, or Frank Sinatra. He’d meant Crowe’s singer-songwriter peers, of course, but the literal-minded hadn’t wanted to take it that way. “This version of ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ makes the one you’re familiar with sound like something off a Westlife album…” If he’d waited, he’d have found that the “Dressed” version (inevitably, Juliet came to be known as Dressed, for ease of distinction) reasserted its superiority quite comfortably, after its initial shock. And he wished he hadn’t mentioned Westlife at all, seeing as some crazed Westlife fan would come across the reference and spend a day posting obscene messages on the message boards.

In his naïveté, he hadn’t really expected anger. But then he imagined himself checking the website idly for some tidbit of gossip—news of an interview with the guy who did the cover art for the EP, say—and discovering there was a whole new album out there that he hadn’t heard. It would have been like turning on the TV for the local weather forecast, only to find that the sky was falling in. He wouldn’t have been happy, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to read some other bastard’s smug review. He would have hated the reviewer, certainly, and he would probably have decided there and then that the album was no good. He began to worry that his ecstatic praise might have done Naked a disservice: now nobody—none of the real fans, anyway, and it was difficult to imagine that many other people would bother with it—would be able to listen to it without prejudice. Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

The responses that meant the most to him came via e-mail, from the Crowologists he knew well. Ed West’s e-mail said, simply, “Fuck me. Gimme. Now.” Geoff Old-field’s said (with unnecessary cruelty, Duncan thought), “That, my friend, was your moment in the sun. Nothing quite as good will ever happen to you again.” John Tay lor went for a quote, from “The Better Man”: “Luck is a disease / I don’t want it near me.” He created a mailing list and started sending them all the tracks, one by one. Tomorrow morning, a handful of middle-aged men would be regretting that they had gone to bed much too late.